Foreign Policy

Former Pentagon advisor: ‘We Have No Idea What War Is’

BY SOFREP News Team

A barroom brawl is not war, because it’s not organized, and it has no political ends. Economic competition between states, however fierce, is not war, because it’s not bloody—it’s mass, it’s organized, and political—but it’s not violent.

Legal scholar Rosa Brooks spoke to the Atlantic about her book on her time as a civilian advisor in President Barack Obama’s Pentagon, the United States bombed Libya again. This was the third such strike in the U.S. campaign against Daesh ‘ISIS‘ there, but this time, Reuters reported, U.S. officials said it “marked the start of a sustained air campaign.”Brooks contends that the amorphous nature of modern security threats—conflict and terrorism, but also things like climate change and financial collapse—have made it “increasingly difficult to define a uniquely ‘military’ role and mission.” It’s not just that the Bush and Obama administrations’ pursuit of terrorists around the world have pushed the geographic boundaries of the so-called war on terror beyond the more formal battlefields of Afghanistan and Iraq.Brooks, a writer and law professor at Georgetown University, bases her account in part on her two-plus years at the Defense Department, where she observed the blurring of the line, in her words, “between war and not-war.”“We live in a world where technology has enabled individuals to cause a level of disruption that it might once have taken war to achieve.”

Read More: The Atlantic
Featured Image – Wikimedia Commons
Advertisement

What readers are saying

Generating a quick summary of the conversation...

This summary is AI-generated. AI can make mistakes and this summary is not a replacement for reading the comments.

ABOUT THE AUTHOR